Chuck Berry fanatics, your ship has come in, and it’s the Queen Mary — or maybe we should call it the Queen Maybellene. As you’d expect from the Bear Family label, which specializes in gargantuan reissues, this 16-CD, 396-song box doesn’t simply span Berry’s career, it embraces virtually every musical note the man has ever issued. You’ll find all of his released album tracks and singles, starting with an obscure 1954 recording and including everything from the Chess, Mercury and Atco labels, plus every surviving alternate take. Also here are five CDs’ worth of concert performances from 1956 to 1972.
Which Chuck E. Weiss do we talk about here? The one who so impressed blues legends Lightnin Hopkins and Willie Dixon as a Denver teenager that they took him out in their road bands? The one who lived in LA's Tropicana Hotel in the 70s alongside Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones, ending up namechecked on the classic Waits albums Small Change and Nighthawks at the Diner, and in Rickie Lee Jones hit "Chuck E.'s in Love"? The one who has recorded with Tom Waits, Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Roger Miller, Dr. John, Willie Dixon? Whichever Chuck E. Weiss you choose, he's a legend, and his 2014 album, Red Beans and Weiss, delivers on the big personality. Executive produced by Johnny Depp and Tom Waits, Red Beans and Weiss blends blues, barrelhouse, and bluster into a highly entertaining whole.
Rhythm & Romance was recorded in 1984 and issued in 1985, three years after Somewhere in the Stars. Rhythm & Romance is significant in a number of ways besides its obvious quality as a piece of popular art. Foremost, it's the first recording that really showcases Rosanne Cash as a songwriter. Of the ten tracks here, she wrote six and co-wrote two others. This is the beginning of a new path in her career, which remains to this day, where she writes all of her own material. Secondly, even after the three-year absence and with a radical by country standards cover, the album topped the charts and charted two singles (in those days almost a unheard of).
Celebrating sixty years since the launch of one of the most successful independent record labels in US Popular music. Received wisdom would have us believe that before Motown, no black-owned record company had made a significant impact on the US mainstream. However, the actuality is something else entirely. Way back in the early 50s, long before Berry Gordy had written his first song, VEE-JAY RECORDS - a black, family owned and run, Chicago-based label - was establishing itself via a steady stream of Blues, R&B, DooWop and Gospel hits.
Red House Records is pleased to announce a new release by Ray Bonneville, a poet of the demimonde whose new album, Easy Gone, was released on April 15, 2014. The album finds the French Canadian-born, American-bred guitarist/ songwriter delivering a powerful, gritty batch of songs written from a lifetime of hard-won knowledge, including a stint in Vietnam and a struggle with drug addiction. In his life, he’s been a bush pilot and a cab driver among other jobs, living both in the States and French-speaking Canada. A true raconteur with a lifetime of stories to tell, the self-taught musician was just too busy living to get around to opening his storybook until his early 40s, some 20 years after he started performing.